Is Airbnb Finally Being Welcomed by Corporate Travel?

If the reception Airbnb received at this year's GBTA Convention is any indication, the simple answer to the question in the headline is yes.

While CNN's Richard Quest managed to garner healthy applause from the audience by bringing up Airbnb's duty of care shortcomings on a lodging panel that featured the company's global head of business travel, David Holyoke, Airbnb reps nevertheless seemed downright cozy on the expo floor. (And it's not just because their booth was designed to look like an industrial-chic apartment.)

Travel managers and industry professionals posted images of themselves sitting in the Airbnb booth on various social media channels. GBTA executive director and COO Mike McCormick tweeted a photo of himself smiling alongside Holyoke in the GBTA Studio. An education session about risk management and alternative accommodations included Airbnb Business Travel rep Jason Beckham and featured a testimonial from Meritor manager of global travel and meetings Jack Reynaert, who said Airbnb was the only alternative accommodations provider that "offered the level of security and risk management that we were looking for."

Consider how different all of that is from two years ago. In 2015, there was no booth. There were no selfies. Overall engagement among corporate travel professionals was nonexistent beyond a passionate few.

The question becomes one of successful marketing relationships versus actual industry traction. In any industry, companies that can cough up the dollars can get more of the spotlight. GBTA Allied Leadership Council president Scott Solombrino even joked about it on the main stage during the convention lunch on July 18. As such, there's an argument to be made that Airbnb is being perceived as a bigger player because it has the marketing dollars to position itself that way.

Its growing number of industry partners, however, would suggest otherwise. While tech-driven companies like Salesforce and Facebook were early embracers of Airbnb, the company now counts among its clients more traditional corporations, including the previously mentioned Meritor, as well as Levi's and Morgan Stanley. According to Airbnb, 15 percent of its total room nights globally come from business travel. Airbnb also has integrations, partnerships and data-sharing agreements with iJet, UnitedHealthcare, International SOS, American Express Global Business Travel, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, BCD Travel and Concur TripLink. At the end of June, the company announced it would give Flight Centre Travel Group's corporate division access to its Airbnb for Business inventory. And just days before the GBTA convention kicked off, Airbnb announced its listings would appear alongside traditional accommodations on Concur's desktop booking portal.

While I don't necessarily agree with those who said the Concur integration puts Airbnb in the corporate travel "mainstream"—booking properties still requires toggling away from Concur over to Airbnb's site, the integration is only on the desktop platform and Airbnb has shown little interest in going the traditional distribution route via global distribution systems—it certainly seems to be finding its place in the industry. And Airbnb has plenty of money to help it carve out that place. The company is valued at $31 billion, and it began turning a profit last year. When Holyoke says Airbnb is not going away and it intends to make corporate travel 30 percent of its total business by 2020, the industry should believe it and know that it's going to continue to invest in education and getting its message out there in the corporate travel space.

What is that message? For the time being, it's that Airbnb doesn't want its corporate clients to use it for every overnight stay, just a portion. "This isn't about us versus hotels," Holyoke told me. Clarifying that, plus enabling risk management capabilities and travel manager tools, already seems to have gone a long way with the corporate travel audience, which isn't ready to get rid of hotels but is ready to embrace new content that keeps a diverse traveling population satisfied.

Airbnb is still a long way off from broad adoption; according to Certify's SpendSmart Report for the fourth quarter of 2016, which highlighted Airbnb usage, Airbnb accounted for only 0.27 percent of lodging expenses. But that share still marked twice as many Airbnb transactions than were seen in 2014. A Concur analysis from November also found that the number of companies for which a traveler expensed an Airbnb stay grew 32 percent between the second quarter of 2015 and the second quarter of 2016. If that growth came before Airbnb was really putting its weight into corporate travel, consider how much more it may accomplish now that it's becoming a more normalized part of this industry.